Subsumption Demodulation in First-Order Theorem Proving

01/28/2020

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by   Bernhard Gleiss, et al.

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Motivated by applications of first-order theorem proving to software analysis, we introduce a new inference rule, called subsumption demodulation, to improve support for reasoning with conditional equalities in superposition-based theorem proving. We show that subsumption demodulation is a simplification rule that does not require radical changes to the underlying superposition calculus. We implemented subsumption demodulation in the theorem prover Vampire, by extending Vampire with a new clause index and adapting its multi-literal matching component. Our experiments, using the TPTP and SMT-LIB repositories, show that subsumption demodulation in Vampire can solve many new problems that could so far not be solved by state-of-the-art reasoners.